CI/CD with Github Actions

Introduction

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) is the cornerstone to many modern day software projects. Automating the process the building, testing, and deploying code tightens the software release cycle, improving the software delivery times and increasing the reliability and consistency of software.

Goals of this guide

In this workshop, we will be covering the following:

1. What is CI/CD?

2. What is Github Actions?

3. Anatomy of Github Actions

4. Implementing a CI/CD pipeline on an example application

5. Advanced use cases for Github Actions

As we discuss the types of workflows you can achieve with Github Actions, we will start unpacking the various concepts in Github Actions.

Prerequisites

To start using Github Actions for CI/CD, ensure that the following are properly setup:

1. Create a Github account. You can refer to this guide.

2. Download Git to your local machine and set it up. You may refer to our installation guide here.

3. Optionally, download the act CLI

This guide will assume that you have some basic understanding of what Github is and some of its core behavior such as repositories, issues, pull requests, etc. We will also be using Javascript as the basic language for all examples for its accessibility. If you have never used Javascript before, you can refer to our guide for a quick refresher. However, this guide does not require in-depth knowledge of Javascript as we will be focusing on writing Github Actions instead.